Clarke mourns the victims of the 1991 Gulf War: sea creatures and birds poisoned by oil, a refugee at a closed border, young soldiers and their families, the burnt earth and blazing oil wells, and finally truth itself.
How Clarke's list, each part opening with For like a prayer or an elegy, images of oil, fire and darkness, and a view that widens from one turtle to the earth and sun show the far-reaching damage of war.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'For the green turtle with her pulsing burden', 'their nest of sickness', 'the cormorant in his funeral silk', 'the veil of iridescence on the sand', 'For Ahmed at the closed border', 'the soldier with his uniform of fire', 'the boy fusilier who joined for the company', 'the whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder', 'the long migrations and the slow dying', 'For vengeance, and the ashes of language'.
Form: seven three-line stanzas written as one long list, every stanza and many lines opening with For, like a prayer or an elegy, until the last line turns from mourning to vengeance.
Context: Gillian Clarke (born 1937 in Cardiff), National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016; the Gulf War of 1991, when a coalition of more than thirty countries led by the United States, including Britain, drove Iraq's army out of Kuwait, and the retreating Iraqi forces released oil into the Gulf and set Kuwait's oil wells alight; and her own account of the poem: every detail came from news reports, from photographs of cormorants coated in oil and of a soldier burnt in his tank to radio interviews with the mothers of young soldiers, and the ashes of language are the death of truth in war.
Links within the cluster: What Were They Like? (a world destroyed by war), We Lived Happily during the War (the global reach of modern war), Songs for the People (lamenting set against new songs) and Vergissmeinnicht (soldiers among war's victims).
An unseen poem paired with it might share a world changed by conflict, harm to nature as well as people, or mourning.
OCR set it in June 2025 part (a), with Yehuda Amichai's The Place Where We Are Right, on how conflict changes the world: the mark scheme picks out the For that opens each part like a prayer, the burning words of the closing lines and the hissing s sounds round the cormorant; examiners in 2024 found answers retelling what the images refer to instead of analysing how they work, and praised those on the list and the view widening from a turtle to the earth and sun.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
